 Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here at the Nutanix Dotnext Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome you to the program. Two first time guests, but a partnership we've been talking about since the early days of Nutanix. Bernie Hannon, Strategic Alliance Director with Citrix and Raghu Nandan, Senior Director of Product Management. Nutanix, thanks so much for joining me. All right, so, Bernie, let's start with you. How long have you been with Citrix, a little bit of background, and when will you start working for Nutanix? 10 years at Citrix, and we'll see about Nutanix. But, no, I'm Strategic Alliance's Director. I manage our Alliance partnership with Nutanix, and I've been doing that now for about two and a half years. All right, Raghu, a little bit about your background, and you must have worked for Citrix before, right? Coincidentally, worked at Citrix for a while. Pretty close to 10 years, actually, and I've been at Nutanix for almost three years now. I'm part of the product team managing the full-stack journey that we've been on, building beyond software-defined storage with the embedded virtualization with AHV, the ops, orchestration layers on top, and coincidentally, given the background with Citrix, it was the first logical place for us to start to make Citrix a tailored fit for that particular full-stack offering, right? So that's what we've been working on, too. Yeah, and let's talk about that, Bernie, because most people, for a couple of years, it was like, oh, well, Nutanix, they're that little VDI company and do that, and that, of course, was a strong partnership between Citrix and Nutanix, but it's much more than that, so maybe it gives a little bit kind of the breadth and depth of the partnership. Well, yeah, so Nutanix was not shy about letting us know that they shared a common vision about what HCI could do and what a partnership together could do to be able to strengthen or to further each other's strategies, and it was really all about trying to simplify the customer experience with VDI, and that's always been a challenge for our customers, and Nutanix, very quickly, was able to demonstrate that they could make deploying Citrix on the infrastructure so much easier for customers, and that's really what we've been about working on since we started this partnership. Yeah, and it's been the perfect tailored workload, like I said before, right, so we're at this journey of replatforming the data center and collapsing as many silos as possible while bringing that public cloud-like consumption model where people in the IT departments can go focus on applications and services and more business-oriented functions and kind of let IT be a functional thing without spending inordinate amounts of time, and while we started our journey as a company with VDI, we've expanded certainly to a bunch of other workloads, but when we brought this net-new concept to the marketplace in September of 2015 by embedding this KVM-derived hypervisor as a built-in part of the overall solution, Citrix was a natural place for us to start, and that's kind of what we've been working on in that dimension. Yeah, cloud has been a strategy, it's gone through a lot of changes in the industry, but last year, I talked to Christian Riley a little bit about Citrix Cloud, Nutanix has had enterprise cloud and rolling out various pieces, maybe you could both speak a little bit to kind of those cloud strategies. Sure, so from a Citrix standpoint, we've been busy migrating our customers from the perpetual license model to a subscription model and to leverage that through our Citrix Cloud, where we've moved the Citrix control plane up into the cloud as a service. And so again, another step in making the whole process of deploying Citrix even easier. So that's really been our strategy and working with Nutanix, we've made that process even easier through the automation tools that they've developed. And now, shortly with the next release, Nutanix solutions are going to come Citrix Cloud ready. And that essentially means that customers can not only have the benefits of that subscription model, but they'll also be able to have the benefits of being able to manage Citrix as a service in Citrix Cloud and get the best of both worlds. And that for our customers is really a true hybrid cloud experience. And the enterprise cloud for us as Nutanix is really a fabric that kind of envelops the public, the private infrastructure and even stretches out into the edge, right? Increasingly we use this term, the dispersed cloud. And in the context of Citrix, like Bernie said, while the Citrix Cloud makes the deployment of the entire Citrix software stack a non-hassle experience for customers, there is still something to be said for the actual infrastructure where the user VMs are provisioned. This is the classic use case for hybrid in a sense because it overcomes all the desktops as a service bottlenecks where you have users on campus logging on to desktops in the public cloud, yet the applications they need to access are having to hairpin back into the enterprise data center. And this combination of the Citrix Cloud and on-prem Nutanix infrastructure that just in one click plugs to the Citrix Cloud lets people experience the best of both worlds. This zero kind of like a one minute deployment of Citrix software stack and a one click experience from Prism to connect the infrastructure to start provisioning desktops and you can be from nothing to a production environment in literally minutes. How does management play between the two of your companies? The management layer. The management layer from a Citrix Cloud standpoint or? So, talked a little bit about Prism there. Oh yeah. Talking about how column fits in. Citrix has a number of software pieces just trying to understand kind of the boundaries, overlaps, you know, integrations. That's really where Com has done an excellent job of making a lot of that transparent, right? So, the whole idea is that from the start with just a couple of clicks you're able to make the connection to Citrix Cloud, register and then drop the Citrix Cloud connector onto the Nutanix infrastructure and from there Prism is really managing that management experience. It's really two dimensions, right? So, think of the Citrix management layer as everything that encapsulates the policies, the governance models, everything around the performance expectations of VDI. Who gets what kind of a desktop? What kind of a profile? Persistent, non-persistent, all those kinds of things. Seamlessly plugs into Prism which manages the rest of the infrastructure. Physical, virtual with ops and orchestration. So, I don't have to worry about this user needs a graphics-enabled desktop. Where would I go provision this? The system just automatically detects that. Or I have this thousand user environment and I don't quite know whether I've provisioned the right amount of compute and memory to the right kinds of users. Prism just tells you through behavioral learning these user VMs seem under provision, these user VMs seem over provision. So, you're getting the best ROI in terms of your infrastructure spend. So, think of Prism as everything that manages the physical data center infrastructure including virtualization and ops and the Citrix management stack this plugs into that to layer on the governance policies on top. And then the things that Citrix does in the background in terms of managing the scale out and making sure that everything is kept evergreen and that the tools are always being refreshed. That happens automatically and seamlessly in the background. Great. Nutanix has been announced at their last show, the Google Cloud partnership. My understanding there's potential intersections between GCP, Citrix and Nutanix. Talk to us a little bit about what we would see going forward, how those potentially play together. Well, so Citrix has a new partnership with Google Cloud Platform and our Citrix workspace and environment, the entire digital desktop now is available to deploy onto Citrix, I'm sorry, onto Google Cloud Platform. And we believe that with the burgeoning partnership that's taking place with Nutanix and Google Cloud Platform that there's an opportunity in the future to develop some new stories better together. So it's something that we're just beginning to explore now but we think there's a lot of possibilities there. I'll give you a classic example, right? Like last week I was speaking with a customer that's running Citrix on Nutanix and they're running it for a certain number of users, let's say a few thousand users. And every year at holiday season they have these three or 400 contracting employees that come online that they need extra capacity for, for these temporary desktops. And this combination of Citrix with Google Cloud Platform and the Xi Cloud Services provides the perfect solution in which you could create on-demand capacity for kind of burst expectation of resources. And once the contractors have gone away the environment shrinks back. So this is a start of a journey and we'll figure some things out but there are some pretty strong synergies for the three to come together to solve for those kinds of interesting use cases. Great example and we think there's a lot more like those to come. Okay, I want to give you both the last word, either customers, any customer story you can tell or anything else we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Well, from a Citrix standpoint I have to say that they are really appreciative of the partnership that we have with Nutanix. I think they feel good knowing that it's an alliance partnership that we have with Nutanix so that they can make their investments with confidence. They've had a relationship with Citrix for a long time and there's trust that goes with that and in the Citrix name and the fact that we have a strong alliance partnership makes them feel good investing in Nutanix and then seeing how that better together story is really unfolding for them. And it's a great partnership for several reasons but I think the single most important reason is the amount of customer delight it offers when people bring Citrix and Nutanix together and I've lost count of the number of customers that are appreciative of how much better their environments are and we are super excited about how much further we can take that journey with this combination of Citrix Cloud with this one-click experience within Frizzly. Yeah, it's not just a promise if it's actually being delivered and they're saying it's actually happening. Bernie and Raghu, thank you so much for giving us the update on the partnership there. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.